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Firecrawl provides powerful document parsing capabilities, allowing you to extract structured content from various document formats. This feature is particularly useful for processing files like spreadsheets, Word documents, and more.

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Supported Document Formats

Firecrawl currently supports the following document formats:
  • Excel Spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xls)
    • Each worksheet is converted to an HTML table
    • Worksheets are separated by H2 headings with the sheet name
    • Preserves cell formatting and data types
  • Word Documents (.docx, .doc, .odt, .rtf)
    • Extracts text content while preserving document structure
    • Maintains headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables
    • Preserves basic formatting and styling
  • PDF Documents (.pdf)
    • Extracts text content with layout information
    • Preserves document structure including sections and paragraphs
    • Handles both text-based and scanned PDFs (with OCR support)
    • Supports mode option to control parsing strategy: fast (text-only), auto (text with OCR fallback, default), or ocr (force OCR)
    • Priced at 1 credit per-page. See Pricing for details.

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PDF Parsing Modes

Use the parsers option to control how PDFs are processed:
ModeDescription
autoAttempts fast text-based extraction first, falls back to OCR if needed. This is the default.
fastText-based parsing only (embedded text). Fastest option, but will not extract text from scanned or image-heavy pages.
ocrForces OCR parsing on every page. Use for scanned documents or when auto misclassifies a page.
// Object syntax with mode
parsers: [{ type: "pdf", mode: "ocr", maxPages: 20 }]

// Default (auto mode)
parsers: [{ type: "pdf" }]

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How to Use Document Parsing

Document parsing in Firecrawl works in two ways:
  1. URL-based parsing (/v2/scrape): provide a URL that points to a supported document type.
  2. File upload parsing (/v2/parse): upload file bytes directly with multipart/form-data.
For URL-based parsing, Firecrawl detects file type from extension or content type automatically.

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Upload documents with /v2/parse

Use /v2/parse when the source document is local or not publicly accessible by URL. 
curl -X POST "https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/parse" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer fc-YOUR-API-KEY" \
  -F 'options={"formats":["markdown"]}' \
  -F "file=@./document.docx;type=application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document"

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Example: Scraping an Excel File

Node
import Firecrawl from '@mendable/firecrawl-js';

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({ apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY" });

const doc = await firecrawl.scrape('https://example.com/data.xlsx');

console.log(doc.markdown);

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Example: Scraping a Word Document

Node
import Firecrawl from '@mendable/firecrawl-js';

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({ apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY" });

const doc = await firecrawl.scrape('https://example.com/data.docx');

console.log(doc.markdown);

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Output Format

All supported document types are converted to clean, structured markdown. For example, an Excel file with multiple sheets might be converted to: 
## Sheet1

| Name  | Value |
|-------|-------|
| Item 1 | 100   |
| Item 2 | 200   |

## Sheet2

| Date       | Description  |
|------------|--------------|
| 2023-01-01 | First quarter|